Still slim and lively in his early 70s, Anwar Congo is a fun guy who likes a drink and a smoke, dances the cha-cha and favours loud shirts. He is also, it seems, a mass murderer, one of the Indonesian gangsters who took part in the organised killing of real or supposed Communists in 1965, following an attempted military coup against the left-leaning president Sukarno.

Though many facts about the period are still in dispute, it's accepted that at least half a million died and that, as the American filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer indicates at the start of this extraordinary documentary, the killings were carried out with the support of the West. Congo claims to have personally killed more than 1000 people, mostly by strangling them with piano wire. ''At first we beat them to death,'' he recalls, ''but there was too much blood.''

The originality of The Act of Killing lies in Oppenheimer's decision to treat artifice as a roundabout path to truth.

Almost half a century on, there's no way of testing these statements (though, equally, no reason to disbelieve them). The originality of The Act of Killing lies in Oppenheimer's decision to treat artifice as a roundabout path to truth. Congo is invited to devise and star in a film about his own crimes, recreated with elaborately gruesome make-up and hordes of extras. He has final say on what happens in each scene, and takes on multiple roles: sometimes executioner, sometimes victim.

Still from The Act of Killing.

It's hard to tell if Congo is boasting about his ghastly career, or if he's signed on for Oppenheimer's project as penance. He seems to hover between viewpoints, and the tone of the film-within-the-film shifts accordingly, with pastiches of every genre from musical to noir. In one scene, Congo's victims return as angry ghosts; in another they present him with a medal in thanks for sending them to the next world.

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These vignettes are often ludicrous enough to resemble the ''sweded'' videos – el cheapo remakes of pop classics such as Ghostbusters – in Michel Gondry's farce Be Kind Rewind. But laughter sticks in the throat when Congo uses his knife on a stuffed toy to demonstrate what he once did to a child: no amount of explicit gore could be worse than what appears in the mind's eye.

A catalogue of horrors lasting almost three hours, The Act of Killing is first nauseating, then numbing, then rather perplexing. As a guide to recent Indonesian history, it's all but useless; nor does it purport to offer a psychological portrait of Congo ''in the round''.

Oppenheimer's real concerns are more abstract and philosophical. Initially, he seems to offer a version of the ''banality of evil'' argument: Congo is seen as a limited, even pitiful figure, unwilling or unable to acknowledge the reality of what he has done.

More interestingly, this is a film about the two-way traffic between reality and the screen image, each helping to shape the other.

Back in the day, Congo and his pals were known as ''movie theatre gangsters'' and liked to compare themselves to film stars. Nowadays, Congo really is a star of sorts, as we learn via a scarifying Indonesian talk-show clip in which the bubbly host congratulates him on his record of slaughter.

So what about Oppenheimer, a filmmaker manufacturing images of his own? Implicitly, his decision to accept Congo as a creative collaborator poses the question of whether it's possible to represent evil convincingly without taking on some guilt by association.

The truth is that he would hardly have embarked on this project if he wasn't intrigued by violence in his own way, and this, at least, is something Congo understands. ''Why do people watch films about Nazis?'' he asks. ''To see power and sadism.'' By these standards, The Act of Killing is an undeniably mesmerising horror show.

1 comment so far

I'm sorry but as interesting as this sounds, I could not watch someone demonstrate how they killed a child.